So, this is probably going to be a long one because there’s a fair bit to discuss but I’ll try to keep it concise.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, Seagull recently posted up a video talking about his frustrations and concerns with the current state of Overwatch, which while has been a topic of a lot of discussion within the main bulk of the community is now being addressed by those who work closer with the devs themselves. This was then followed up by a much longer video going into more depth and discussion with other prominent Overwatch streamers/OWL figures. Your Overwatch did a pretty good job of summing it up in their analysis, saying that Competitive in it’s current state is trying to cater to too many crowds and failing at all of them simultaneously.
Honestly I agree with a lot of the points that have been brought up, and there’s a few things i want to add, and also get feedback and discussion on. From my perspective, the experience of Competitive in Overwatch is largely a shambles in its current state, where solo queue often feels like you have to try and pull a stable composition out of 3+ support/tank/DPS mains with few people communicating on comms and refusing to group up, while the experience of LFG being people not communicating even when they actively have mics and however the SR “balancing” is rated. I’m going to talk about LFG and grouping up as I have flat out given up with trying to solo queue into competitive games at this point.
From what I’ve found in group settings (I’m currently in Platinum) is that when the LFG recommends people joining by their SR range in accordance to the leader who has set up the lobby, the SR discrepancy between the highest and the lowest in the group can often result in harsher penalties and lower rewards for those who are in higher end of the group SR rating, due to being placed in games where the average SR is rated lower than their actual SR and judges them accordingly. I’m surprised that the LFG system doesn’t have a function that lets everyone in the lobby see what the SR ranges are, as I’ve played in lobbies where the SR +/- has been 150 but I’ve ended up playing in games with people with 2200 SR unknowingly, then the games being judged harsher on my end as a result due to the system judging the games to be “easier” from my perspective. I understand to an extent why this happens, but it’s incredibly frustrating when i can win a close game and gain 15 SR while losing a close game i drop 35 SR even when my own statistics (from what i can see of them anyway, since we as players don’t even have access to the vast majority of useful statistics) have been fairly good, and I know a number of other people who have found confusing and inconsistent SR payouts from wins regardless of whether they were a complete wipeout or a close match.
While I’m not going to talk about specific character balancing (because i have gripes with Doomfist among other things) the point about hard counters has now locked players into a position of either change or effectively throw, with Tracer/Brigitte being a prime example of this. Some of the subtlety of play has been lost as a result and players will end up getting toxic at people playing off-meta characters very quickly as a result, which is a shame considering the sheer variety of the roster and the possible tactics that can be pieced together if it wasn’t such a hard counter game in it’s current state.
I also do want to talk about the rising number of smurf accounts following the Humble Bundle sale, as there is a lot more of them now coming onto the ladder in recent weeks following the sale, and also a rise in toxicity from players who have either been banned getting a new account for cheap and being toxic towards people, or from players who have multiple accounts specifically to have an account for trolling/throwing, or for playing with lower SR friends when their main is significantly higher, which in both cases causes extreme frustration and has caused me to not touch the game for several days after.
Ideally the community need better ways of building connections with groups of people who have a similar mindset in the competitive ladder, with guilds/clans being an obvious solution to this. My concern however is that after Blizzcon and the dev panels there Jeff Kaplan stated they wanted it to affect more than just Overwatch which counter to their previous comments regarding the implementation of the LFG system of “crawl, walk, run” mentality of new features, and would also significantly slow down the much needed feature at a point where there is a much greater need for player agency in their experiences.
There are other problems with the game currently (recycled events, lack of content outside of events, endorsement system effects wearing off and rising toxicity) that i’ll probably cover in a different post, but given how much i have enjoyed Overwatch and have love playing it I’m starting to run out of patience with the issues. I’d really like to hear from others on their thoughts as the whole issue of ranked has been annoying me for a few months now.